Porn Plague / Has porn's proliferation desensitized us to its power?

Andi Zeisler

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, July 25, 2004

I saw my first porn movie at age 13. It was an event that involved planning and care: My friend Jenny's sister procured a tape from the Video Ranger while Jenny and I skulked in the aisles of the 7-Eleven down the street, waiting for the handoff. The movie itself, a soft-core affair set in a Club Med-style paradise with no plot, was tamer in retrospect than anything found nightly on the Showtime channel, but to us it was a big deal. We returned the tape the next day tucked underneath the latest John Hughes release, and the video-store owner, his belly straining against his polo shirt, eyed us benevolently and winked. "Enjoy the movie?" he asked. Mortified, we hauled butt out the door.

This is how it was done, once. Your first glimpses of porn were illicit, thrilling and usually brokered by an older relative or school friend. Magazines were passed around, pages from Judy Blume's "Forever" were dog-eared, parents' sock drawers were raided, all for a glimpse into what made the still- fuzzy idea of sex so intriguing and so forbidden.

It was the '80s, when the biggest revolutions pornography had seen were Betamax and VCR technologies that made movies cheaper and quicker to produce, while democratizing porn viewing, making it suddenly the equal province of raincoated pervs and PTA parents (and, ultimately, their kids).

Then came the Internet, whose biggest accomplishment may be that it has made pornographic content instantly available to anyone with a high-speed connection without making them feel like a pop-eyed flesh junkie. After all, when smut is just a mouse click away -- and your e-mail inbox is refreshed on a hourly basis with spam that leads you straight to it -- the act of looking is less of an effort, and less damning. People who would never consider going to a strip club or renting "Shaving Private Ryan" think nothing of logging on to the Internet -- what's a detour or five to peruse the porn offerings?

This ready availability of pornographic imagery has furthered a more general X-rated sprawl that, for the past few decades, has slowly fused to our existing cultural lexicon. From Playboy and Hustler to the Starr Report and "Boogie Nights," the images of pornography have moved incrementally from margin to center, and now show every sign of hunkering down for the duration. Porn is now not only represented in, but an indelible part of, everything from high culture to fashion magazines to college curricula.

For the porn industry, this is progress. For a medium that's forever been a locus of societal hypocrisy, porn's octopus-like hold on our culture signals that the stigma surrounding it is starting to melt away. Carly Milne, a former San Francisco resident and dot-com casualty who moved to Los Angeles three years ago and is now a publicist in the adult-film industry, says the mainstreaming of porn is as much a revelation within the industry as it is in the larger culture. "As much as we wind up influencing the mainstream, it influences us," she says. Milne points out that porn actors are now as recognizable as Hollywood actors -- citing as exhibit A Jenna Jameson, the fluffy film vixen who has appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" and whose upcoming autobiography, "How To Make Love Like a Porn Star," was penned by former New York Times writer Neil Strauss. The more cultural products -- movies, music, fashion -- proudly wear their porn influences, Milne figures, the more porn is positioned as a legitimate business. "Everybody [in the industry] is hyper- aware of the way porn is being appropriated. Making porn sell is easy. But now everybody from stars to directors wants to know how they can mainstream their product. Getting coverage in Hustler is already a challenge -- but now everyone wants to get in People."

Carol Queen, staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, attributes the start of what she terms "porn creep" to none other than the U.S. government. She recalls a brochure written by then-surgeon general C. Everett Koop in the mid- '80s about HIV and AIDS prevention. "It made reference to all these sexual practices that no one outside porn was aware of -- stuff like fisting," she remembers. "In the midst of this decade of censorship, here was this guy who looked like Col. Sanders talking really graphically about fisting, and it was like Daddy took the lid off the box. Whether or not you were praising [this candidness], it jumped sexual discourse up a notch."

Two decades later, what was formerly an outlaw subset of entertainment has become fun and ironic (Tony Award-winning musical "Avenue Q" features a porn-loving puppet character), intellectually trendy (following in the footsteps of similar campus erotica publications at Vassar and Swarthmore, Harvard University recently debuted a campus porn magazine, H-Bomb), and culturally significant (photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' coffee-table book of porn-star portraits, complete with essays on pornography penned by the likes of Adam Gopnik, John Malkovich and A.M. Holmes, will be out in October from Bulfinch). But though we may get a kick out of the trappings of porn -- the winking references to John Holmes or Traci Lords, the phrase "money shot" cropping up on NPR and MSNBC with somewhat alarming regularity -- now that it's out of the nightstand drawer for good, what everyone from politicians to pundits wants to know is how it's affecting our real lives.

The reigning fear, at least in popular media, is that increasingly easy access to porn, together with the sexualization of everything from clothing brands to food, is going to desensitize us to non-porn arousal, raise the bar of what's considered sexy to even more unnatural heights, and subsequently mean that future generations will forget how love and sex once went together. In an October 2003 New York magazine article, "The Porn Myth," Naomi Wolf worried that porn, far from turning men into the raving, sex-mad predators that anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon once warned against, is turning them off of regular, nondigital women. For too many men, she concludes, "real naked women are just bad porn." A recent People article, "The Cyberporn Generation," interviewed teenagers and researchers to sketch a picture of young people whose sexual norms are colored by Internet porn before they've even been to second base.

Both articles take a jarringly retrograde view of the consumers of adult content, painting women as victims of porn culture rather than sometime consumers. In fact, the female demographic is probably the biggest catalyst for porn's cultural crossover. Adella O'Neal, publicist for the interactive adult-DVD company Digital Playground, says that in 2000 roughly 9 percent of the company's consumers were women; four years later, that figure has bloomed to 53 percent. O'Neal credits the Internet with the shifting demographics and active female market: "It provides autonomy and privacy where [before] there was none."

Female porn consumption is supposed to be a positive revelation, and for many women it is. From a cultural perspective, women's consumption of porn has had a more sweeping effect than simply encouraging a more open dialogue about sexuality. In many ways, it has dispensed with all dialogue: Witness the migration of the stripper pole -- it's not just nudie-joint furniture anymore. It's been moved out of strip clubs and into female-focused realms such as "Oprah" and "Trading Spaces," as well as various striptease aerobics classes and DVDs. It's not there to provoke an in-depth analysis about the power dynamic of the viewer and the viewed; nor is it there to make a statement about the politics of sex work. It's there because it makes a handy bedpost (on "Trading Spaces"), or it provides a killer workout with a frisson of naughtiness (on "Oprah").

Looking around at the evidence of porn's influence on fashion and grooming, it would be natural to conclude that women view porn much like we view fashion magazines. Both are fantasies that offer helpful inspiration with a very specific set of beauty-focused imperatives. Take the Brazilian bikini wax: Less than a decade ago, it was, in America at least, the exclusive province of the adult entertainer, and was even dubbed "the Playboy wax" for its ubiquity in men's-magazine centerfolds. These days, pubes au natural are relegated to the specialty section of the Adam & Eve catalog, and bikini waxers like New York's J Sisters are beauty-world celebrities. The Brazilian wasn't in the grooming repertoire of the average urban woman five or six years ago. But the growing female interest in porn means women are comparing their nether regions to those on the TV or computer screen and feel they aren't making the carnal grade. It's probably a pretty short distance from there to today's burgeoning trend in cosmetic surgeries like vaginoplasty, labial reduction and pubic lifts. This annexation of porn ideals represents the reversal of all of Betty Dodson's hard work in decades past: Where we once believed comparing our vaginas to other women's would teach us to be more accepting of our own, we now know that doing so may convince us our equipment isn't up to snuff. We take our cues from the dominant culture, after all, and the dominant culture lately happens to be less about our bodies, ourselves, and more about pneumatic blondes with extremely tidy pudenda.

This is where culture's X-rated spree hits a wall. Everyone's gratified to be in the loop when cocktail-party conversation turns to, say, Ron Jeremy's reality-TV career, but eventually there's a point where what seems like a hip attitude toward smut is undermined by a visit from our deeply moral selves. This is not to say that behind every open-minded, sex-positive citizen lurks a conservative smut patroller. It's the contrary: The more aware we become of porn creep, the more obvious it is that smut writ large quickly becomes style without substance. There's no message in all this sex except that it's sexy, or meant to be. And there comes a point when it's reasonable to do a little hand-wringing, usually on behalf of "the children." We saw it in the aftermath of the 2004 Super Bowl, when the skin-movie trope of a man ripping away a woman's top became a little too real due to the unheeded appearance of Janet Jackson's breast. We see it every time Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera mounts a new, more sexually charged tour to entertain our tweens. I see it when I go shopping with my 14-year-old niece, who represents the audience consumer Nation writers Alison Pollet and Paige Hurwitz had in mind when they wrote a January 2004 piece called "Strip Till You Drop," indicting the "cute and tawdry" stripper-chic clothing and accessories that have become a mainstay of teeny marketing.

We may be right to wonder whether these mediated signals and products are assigning young people -- young girls in particular -- a sense of personal sexual agency, or simply telling them that their real power lies in their ability to titillate others. The tiny thongs printed with cherries, dollar bills and phrases like "Feeling lucky?" that are regularly peddled to tweens at retailers Abercrombie & Fitch and Delias.com, for instance, suggest a vision of female sexuality that's less about an awareness of authentic pleasure than it is about the commodification of particular body parts. I realize this sounds like a wholesale prudishness toward teen sex, but believe me, if I saw a tween retailer peddling books by Nancy Friday or Susie Bright alongside belly-button jewels and Playboy bunny-logo trucker hats, I'd say it was progress.

If the porning of America has made baroque displays of flesh and lust commonplace enough not to shock, it has also taken away the underlying questions of power and agency that once accompanied them. Carol Queen, for one, thinks this could be dangerous: "The people utilizing sex images aren't using them in a savvy way. They're focusing on simplistic, self-perpetuating sex imagery that doesn't actually take an articulate look at sexuality." In other words, if there are no hard questions, no good answers and no forward movement, porn is just so much white noise. So maybe our outer rogues and inner censors will eventually be made obsolete by porn fatigue -- but in the meantime, it'd be more interesting to push an envelope that actually contains something worthwhile.